Protocol Buffers are a super efficient and very flexible way of serializing structured data. Developed at Google, provide the developers lightspeed serialization and deserialization capabilities.
There a handful of .NET implementations, the most popular one, called protobuf-net, created by Marc Gravell from StackExchange. On top of that library, WebApiContrib project has a Web API Protocol Buffers formatter ready for you to plug in.
More after the jump.
There have been quite a few examples circulating on the web on how one would use SignalR together with Web API. It all started after Brad Wilson had a great example on calling SignalR from API controllers at NDC Oslo 2012.
Even on this blog we looked at calling SignalR from Web API ITraceWriter to provide realtime tracing capabilities.
How about, to avoid any controller-level noise, messaging the connected SignalR subscribers from ActionFilters? While this approach might not be applicable in all scenarios, when it is, I think it could provide a nice layer of separation.
More after the jump.
A friend of mine was recently complaining about how Web API controller centric approach doesn’t really make sense, and that he prefers feature-oriented endpoints. While – in all honesty – I am not sure what he means by that, it got me thinking. Maybe, if we didn’t have to suffix Web API controllers “Controller”, that would make him happy?
More after the jump.
In my humble opinion, Microsoft Roslyn is one of the most exciting things on the .NET stack. One of the many (MANY) things you can do easily with Roslyn, is write your own development-time code analysis tools.
We have talked about Roslyn scripting capabilities on this blog before (twice actually). Let’s look at code analysis today and see how we could built tools that could help Web API developers build nice clean HTTP services.
More after the jump.